Oracle announced last week an update for its VM Server for SPARC, reaching version 2.1. This product, formerly known as Sun Logical Domains, represents the Oracle offer for the Oracle Solaris operating system, running on SPARC processors based servers. Oracle offer includes a x86 solution named Oracle VM Server for x86 (which is now at version 2.2).
This release brings live migration capabilities to the SPARC T-series server family, including SPARC T3, UltraSPARC T2 Plus and UltraSPARC T2 based servers.
Live migration allows administrators to migrate an active domain to another host machine while maintaining application services to users.
Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Oracle linux and virtualisation engineering, says:
With these enhancements, customers can take advantage of an enterprise class virtualization offering that is fully integrated and optimized with the operating system and hardware to not only keep their data centers performing efficiently and cost-effectively, but also to improve application service levels in even the most demanding environments,
Below are listed the other features included in this release:
- Encrypted live migrations, leveraging on-chip accelerators.
- Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) between domains, which allows workload allocation between domains.
- Increased maximum number of virtual networks per domain.
- Networking for Oracle Solaris 11 Express to allow virtual network devices to use shared memory to exchange network packets.
- Virtual Device Service Validation, to validate the name and path for a specified network device or virtual disk.
- Integrated Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) of Cryptographic units and virtual CPUs.
- Enhanced Management Information Base (MIB), which enables the SNMP MIB to use the latest Logical Domains Manager XML interface.
- P2V tool enhancements, which allow more flexibility to convert an existing SPARC server running Oracle Solaris 8, 9 or 10 into a virtualized Oracle Solaris image to run on SPARC T-series servers.
The full documentation can be found here. The download for the product is available here.